


Such Wounds

by DetectiveJoan



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Sam Barnes 2nd person POV, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26262739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Historically, the key to your survival has been to stand perfectly still until either the danger disappeared or you did.
Relationships: Mark Bryant/Damien, Samantha Barnes/Mark Bryant
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23





	Such Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> [Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever. ](https://thehopefulquotes.tumblr.com/post/617652487605846016/such-wounds-to-the-heart-will-probably-never-heal)

There are a few places in his past that Mark can’t (won’t? can’t.) describe to you. Several, actually. Perhaps many. They’re difficult to enumerate; there’s always been a kind of fluidity to space-time for you, even before you learned how to swim through it purposefully.

The point is that once you’ve crawled along all the edges of the coma and poked into all the dingy corners of Tier Five and still come up with questions unanswered, there’s nothing stopping you from completing a bucket turn into the next summer. 

***

Mark loves you, then. 

Loved you. Will love you, will have loved you. 

It’s hard to keep straight when it’s going to start, or when it ended. 

Does Mark love you on that first night in the first motel room, when he sleeps fitfully and wakes often? 

Does he love you a week later, a month later, a hundred and then a thousand miles away, when he naps in the back seat or hums along to the radio? 

*** 

It catches you by surprise, the way Damien looks at Mark when Mark is looking away. It’s not quite a tenderness but a cherishing, like Damien knows Mark holds something valuable and he’s trying to determine how long he should wait before axing the goose to get to the golden egg. 

It’s not unlike how Wadworth had looked at him, but she’d done it from a distance most of the time, through a CCTV feed or from the other side of a one-way mirror. Damien does it from two feet away, when he has Mark trapped in a passenger seat, a restaurant booth, a motel bathroom. 

***

One day you watch them in a diner and there’s nothing happening between them, but there’s a thick path of green and yellow bruises all down Damien’s neck in the shape of Mark’s mouth, and it’s deafening how loudly they don’t acknowledge it. The waitresses’ eyes skip right over it, but Damien’s ability can’t divert your gaze and you can’t stop looking. 

*** 

You go back to the first time you were in the same piece of space-time as Mark, the first time he’d been able to touch you. 

He hadn’t let ten minutes pass before he’d cradled your head with one hand, said “I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time,” and then pressed his lips to yours in a way you hadn’t thought to doubt in the moment.

Had he been thinking about Damien, then? Was he comparing your performance? Your ability? 

***

Damien, with his power gone and brain stripped raw, says, “Please don’t leave.” 

Mark mutters, “Don’t worry.” 

As though it’s absurd, the idea of their being separated. Unthinkable. 

Is that love? Was that love? Will that have been love?

*** 

Joan had said once that Mark was fundamentally good, the most decent person she’d ever met, and you had thought it a high compliment at the time, but now you think back on it as damning faint praise, as an admission that most of Joan’s people are desperately selfish opportunists like Wadsworth and Green and Damien and her parents and you. 

***

The two of them and you are at a rest stop on the side of some highway, somewhere with the scenery rolled out flat in every direction and there’s everywhere to run but nowhere else to look when Mark slides a hand up Damien’s chest and breathes a bit too heavily through alluringly parted lips until Damien leans his whole body forward into the touch and kisses him. It's a demonstrably practiced dance. 

Would Damien have said he loved him then? If Mark had asked? If Damien had wanted Mark to ask? 

You watch the toes of Damien’s boots scuffle the loose dirt as he inches closer; that seems easier than seeing what he does with his hands or —Jesus — with his tongue. 

***

Does Mark love you right now? 

Who would know? Who would tell you? Who would you trust? 

*** 

Damien and Mark never touch until they do. They don’t bump elbows while unpacking takeout, and they don’t brush against each other passing through overly narrow doorways. They don’t hold hands. 

In England, Mark had forgotten a hundred times that he couldn’t reach you, surprised anew every time he casually stretched his arm out only to have his fingers pass straight through your flesh. Right at the end (at the beginning?), when he’d let you lead him into the lake and you’d desperately dug your fingers into his metaphysical bubble, there had been a split second when you had felt his hand in yours. His face had lit up with a smile that made your whole heart flutter, just before—

*** 

You stumble on the first time eventually, but you get there late and miss the previews, barely making it in time to see something cave in Mark’s chest before he lunges across the space between them and grabs at Damien with shaking hands, crashes into a kiss that mostly misses the target. Damien catches him crookedly, one hand on his elbow and one on his waist, like he hadn’t been expecting it. 

“That’s not what I...” Damien falters. 

“The hell it isn't,” Mark says.

***

Historically, the key to your survival has been to stand perfectly still until either the danger disappeared or you did. It’s not like any of this is something you can run from.


End file.
